20,000 people, 192 countries. Welcome to the carbon circus

Robin Pagnamenta, Times Online 24 Oct 09;

It has been billed as the last-chance saloon; a final opportunity for the world to seal a deal to prevent catastrophic climate change.

With only 44 days to go until the meeting in Copenhagen, the world is waiting to see if its politicians can deliver, and live up to the hype.

Whatever the outcome of the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Copenhagen is braced for a carbon circus.

Hotels in the Danish capital are nearly fully booked, meaning that thousands of those due to arrive in the city from December 7 to 18 will have to stay in neighbouring Sweden — pumping out more carbon when they commute daily across the Öresund straits from Malmö.

Amid the razzmatazz, protesters and corporate sponsorship from BMW, Honda and Mercedes, as many as 20,000 delegates from 192 countries will cram into the Bella centre. Their aim is to forge a deal that will cut global greenhouse gas emissions and prevent a rise in temperatures of more than 2C (3.6F).

Scientists believe that any increase above this level would be the tipping point for irreversible damage — paving the way for rising seas, floods, storms and droughts that would threaten hundreds of millions of people.

At the centre of this meeting, led by Yvo de Boer, the UN climate head, is a 180-page document of negotiating text. The Kyoto Protocol, by contrast, which the Copenhagen agreement is meant to replace when it expires in 2012, ran to only 30 pages at the equivalent stage.

“There is limited time and so much to be done,” Andrew Hedges, a partner at Norton Rose, which specialises in carbon law, said. “If political leaders fail then the scientists tell us that the consequences could be catastrophic.”

That may sound like a powerful incentive for a deal to be struck but the challenges are immense.

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block is the complex climate politics between the US, China and India. Developing countries led by China — which is the biggest carbon polluter in the world — and India say that by 2020 the developed world needs to commit itself to cuts at least 40 per cent below 1990 levels to avoid the worst of climate change.

In the US, the second-biggest emitter, the focus on healthcare reform has reduced the chances of a commitment on anything like this scale. The US Senate has not agreed a goal for 2020.

Although China and India are not expected to agree to cuts in their emissions before 2020, coaxing them into longer-term reductions without US leadership will be tough.

It is a stalemate that threatens to kill a deal in Copenhagen despite pledges from the EU, Japan and other countries to cut their emissions by as much as 30 per cent by 2020 — and good progress that has been made in other areas such as an agreement designed to slow global deforestation by awarding forest credits.

There are many reasons why the Kyoto Protocol failed to curb the growth in global emissions; one of which is that its targets applied only to a small group of affluent countries and ignored rapidly growing emissions from the developing world.

Governments want the new treaty to encompass more nations and more sources of greenhouse gases, such as forestry and changing land use. They also want to create a framework for wealthy countries to supply money and technology to poor nations to help them to adapt to and reduce the inevitable impacts of climate change.They are keen to refine a global trading regime for carbon emissions to help to cut greenhouse gases from industry.

Copenhagen is perhaps viewed best as a Bretton Woods for carbon — an agreement that, if successful, could define the global industrial and commercial landscape of the 21st century.

Talk of it as a last-chance saloon may be premature. The most likely outcome may be a political commitment to cut emissions by mid-century and an agreement to keep wrangling over the details.

Scientists believe climate change is an urgent problem and that, according to the last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is more than 90 per cent likely that humans are responsible.

There is already talk of follow-up meetings next year. Copenhagen may merely mark the start of a long period of uncertainty over global carbon regulation that may take years to resolve.